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By Root 2256 0

and ecologically folded, double- and triple-folded her brown paper lunch sack into a thick square for future reuse. I grabbed on to her and she took me back inside to the lab. The experiments continued. Then the day was done. I was given a new fuzzy blanket and more dehydrated food pellets and carrots and a new squishy blue mat to pad the floor of my cage, although this one was sternly superglued to the floor in order to make it more difficult to destroy and scatter if another rage demon should enter me, which it did not. I still disliked being made to sleep in the cage after the scientists had gone home, but at least now I was reassured of a routine—that come morning, I knew the humans would return to fill my day with fun. Night fell again, and again the strange man returned to carry on a nonsense conversation with me for approximately one hour. I fell asleep, I twitched and dreamed and woke with the rising sun, the scientists returned with steaming cups of coffee, and the experiments resumed.

This pattern, needless to relate in exquisite detail, continued for many days and nights. The scientists were pleased with me. They said I was making rapid progress. And every night the lumpy man in the blue uniform would arrive and speak with me for one hour. The language between us was beginning to almost mean something. For instance, we had learned one another’s names, and we had developed an idiosyncratic system of signs and words for greeting and leavetaking. We were beginning to create a little pidgin dialect, a trade language, a lingua franca just for the two of us.

Haywood would point at himself and say, “Ae, ou!” (phonetically: / ’eI:υ / ). This part of my journey is difficult to relate in print because we are constrained somewhat by the tonal inelasticity of text—but essentially Haywood was intoning the two syllables of his first name, minus the consonants.

Then he pointed at me.

I mimicked his gesture, pointing at myself and saying “Aeee… ooooough.”

Haywood made me understand that this was incorrect by scowling and whipping his head from side to side and making an ugly, guttural noise in the back of his throat, like this: “BEEEEEEEEEEEAAAANT!”

Again Haywood pointed at himself and said, “Ae, ou!”

Then he pointed at me.

I pointed at myself and said: “Aeee—ooou.”

“BEEEEEEEEEEEAAAANT!” said Haywood, grimacing and lashing his head from side to side.

Then, pointing at himself: “Ae, ou.”

Pointing at me now.

“Ae… ou?”

“BEEEEEEEEEEEAAAANT!”

This went on many, many times before I finally, perhaps even by accident, pointed at him and said, “Ae, ou.”

He responded by grinning, nodding his head up and down while shrilly ululating—“Lalalalalalalalalalalalalala!”—and he accompanied his song of general positivity by picking up his hoop of many keys and shaking it for me, and the dancing keys jangled and jingled like so many pretty chimes. I clapped, I pant-hooted, I cheered in delight, because I loved the shimmering music they made.

This is something, by the way, that the scientists who worked in the laboratory never once thought of doing: to reward my progress not with tidbits of food, but with beautiful noise. For sometimes I simply was not hungry—so at these times the reward of a treat meant nothing to me outside of the psychological reward of their approval—but my appetite for beautiful noises was always insatiable.

We repeated this many times until I was able to understand that “Ae, ou” was not something that one said when pointing at oneself, but something that one said when pointing at this man in particular. I also came to understand that when Haywood pointed at me, he was asking me to make the sound that meant me: my name. Of course I knew my name, in the sense that I knew to come (or choose not to come) when a human shouted at me, “Bruno!” But I had never dreamed of actually attempting to articulate these two syllables with the glottal machinery of my own chimp mouth, an instrument that had previously been good for little but the ingestion of my food and drink, the inhalation and exhalation of my breath, and the